My 13-year-old daughter came up with a rather nice argument against taking knowledge to be nothing but justified true belief.
Jesus tells us that no one knows the day or the hour of his return. But now for each of the 24 possible hours, we can arrange for someone to have reason to believe that that hour is the hour of return. One of these 24 people will then have a justified true belief as to the hour when Jesus returns. If justified true belief is knowledge, then this would contradict what Jesus told us.
Of course, likely, when Jesus said that no one knows the hour, he was probably talking of a specific hour on a specific date—next Tuesday noon, say, rather than a noon in general. But the argument adapts. If the second coming is somewhere in the next 900,000 years, we could divide up the 8 billion people on earth, give each one reason to believe the second coming is during a specific hour during the next 900,000 years, and then one would be right, and would know, if knowledge is justified true belief.
That said, Jesus didn’t say that no one can know the hour, but only that no one knows the hour. Thus as long as no one actually lucks out and has a justified true belief, we have no contradiction to Scripture even if knowledge is justified true belief.
However, apart from the theological ramifications, I think this argument shows that pretty much anything that could be put into language could be known if knowledge is justified true belief. And that is implausible.
This line of argument also damages this line of thought of mine.
Dr. Pruss, I’ve been thinking about something related to the eschaton, and I’d be interested in your thoughts.
ReplyDeleteIf the eschaton is understood as the renewal of all creation—i.e., the redemption of the entire cosmos from its present high-entropy trajectory—and if God’s salvific purposes extend beyond humanity to other rational civilizations, then it seems possible that its realization could be extraordinarily distant in time.
For instance, suppose there are alien civilizations that would not naturally arise until billions of years in the future. If such civilizations are also included within the scope of divine redemption, would it follow that the eschaton must await their existence? Or is there a reason to think that the eschatological consummation is not temporally dependent on the natural history of all possible intelligent life?
At the same time, this raises a further worry: given the likely temporal scales involved, it seems that all currently existing observers would long have ceased to exist by then. I’m unsure how to reconcile that with traditional eschatological expectations.
I recognize that this is speculative, and I assume the structure of divine providence is far more complex than I’m able to grasp. Still, I’d be grateful for any clarification you might offer.